I was in D H Lawrence's scullery eating a chicken biryani when my boyfriend lodged a complaint. He said that when I'd told him we were going to where sex was invented he hadn't automatically assumed I meant a commuter town south of Skegby.

Through the walls we could hear someone on the television auditioning to be Oliver Twist. Lawrence would have loved the box, I thought. He was unbelievably nosy.

It's 80 years since Lady Chatterley's Lover was first published. If you sent two guineas to Lawrence in Tuscany he'd put one of 1,000 privately printed copies in the post, no questions asked. Within months the London headlines huffed "Famous Writer's Shameful Novel: A Landmark in Evil!" and the book was banned for the next 32 years – but you know that bit of the story already.

Lady Chatterley was actually inspired by a walk. When the 41-year-old Lawrence briefly returned from Italy to his home town of Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, in September 1926, he immediately tramped the circuit of his past, taking in the four houses of his childhood, including this one, where he lived until he was two, a three-storey terrace built by pit owners for their workers, and now possibly the most incongruous private museum-cum-holiday let in England.

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The stone floor sends up a melancholy smell, the back windows look out on to gardens hung with washing, and cars rev their engines on neighbouring streets waiting for girls to clack downstairs in their heels for a big night out in Derby.

One flight up, in the more modernised living room, an electric two-bar gives off a drowsy glow. In the visitors' book, Brett from Kentucky says the place "needs cheering up" and Melvin from Sydney asks "does the sun ever shine here?" But Annette from Greece finds the Sons and Lovers Cottage "cosmic" and she's right. D H himself chewed on fistfuls of bread while sitting on these very back steps.

During that walk in 1926, Lawrence worried about the industrial spread of Nottinghamshire, which he called "the country of my heart". Machines were taking over, he felt – metal was triumphing over the human. "All vulnerable things must perish under the rolling and running of iron," he sighed, and kept walking. And if you continue farther north, to the one-time pit village of Teversal, you too will find the pulse of the book. But not quite yet.

In the village of Old Teversal is Teversal Manor, the house many think is Wragby Hall, where Constance Chatterley lives with her husband Clifford and from which she creeps at night to visit her lover, Mellors.

"Wragby was a long low old house in brown stone, begun about the middle of the 18th century, and added on to, till it was a warren of a place…" And so it is. The manor's current owners, the Marples family, bought the house 14 years ago after finding it stripped of its fittings and its 17th-century grounds overgrown. The now-restored gardens are an idyll for those who want to stay in the hall's renovated gatehouse.

"What's it like living in the actual Wragby Hall?" I asked John Marples, looking over the fields towards the grassy remains of Teversal pit, which closed in the late Seventies – a view partly obscured by oaks planted by the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, before he sailed to the Valley of the Kings to look for Tutankhamen with Howard Carter.

"Well, we still get quite a few applications for gamekeeper," said John, throwing me an amused glance.

But it's still not precisely here that you'll find Lady Chatterley. For her you must turn around, head over Buttery Lane, then west across two fields – and enter the woods.

Lawrence never did well in English at school. It was botany he really liked. His father – a miner from the age of seven who could scarcely read – taught him the names of every plant and flower, and Lawrence knew these woods, the remnants of the great Sherwood itself, like the back of his hand. Bracken and hazel grove, oak and larch. Violets, windflowers, anemones, bluebells, hazels, primroses. Today, in this wood, it is just as it was 80 years ago. Or 500 years ago.

"I consider this is really the heart of England," Sir Clifford says to his wife one day on a walk. "If some of the old England isn't preserved, there'll be no England at all." Connie sits on a tree stump in a blue dress thinking that Clifford isn't a bad man, really, just a bit uptight, and yes, these particular woods do seem to give off a deep and consoling silence.

Somewhere among these trees, apparently, is the site of Mellors's cottage. Mind you, the very elderly Lawrence scholar George Lucas, whose mother was baptised the same day as Lawrence in the same Eastwood church, assured me that the cottage was in the woods by the nearby town of Moorgreen, and even took a picture of it in 1973 before it was knocked down. "I went in and there were nails all over the floor. All sorts of mess."

"What do you think of Lady Chatterley's Lover, George?" I asked. Nothing. Then, as though it had come out to mixed reviews last Christmas: "He upset a lot of people round here with that book."

Out of the woods again and you'll find yourself in the graveyard of St Katherine's church. It's been on this spot for 838 years so Lawrence doubtless popped in at some point, even though he wasn't much for organised religion.

Not that there's any evidence of his going in – just as there's no concrete evidence that Old Teversal is the "Tevershall" of the book, or that Mellors's cottage ever stood anywhere at all, or even that Lady Chatterley was modelled on a beautiful English Bohemian, Rosalind Thornycroft Baynes, with whom Lawrence had an affair in 1920 in Tuscany.

There is, however, a tomb on the wall of St Katherine's I'm certain Lawrence would have noticed. It could, in fact, have been made especially for Lady Chatterley and Mellors. As my boyfriend sweetly pointed out, it's just about the nicest epitaph any couple north, south, east or west of anywhere, including Skegby, could hope for. "1714. James and Diana Molyneaux," it reads. "Here we lie. Happy in the conjugal."

Essentials

Sons and Lovers Cottage, 28 Garden Road, Eastwood, sleeps five and is available for rent through John Elliot (01773 712132). Teversal Manor’s gardens and shop are open to the public most days.

The Manor’s luxury gatehouse (sleeps up to 16), a good base for walking or cycling in the region, can be rented for short and long breaks (01623 554569; www.teversalmanor.co.uk).